298 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 
six weeks before they are transformed into the perfect 
fly. 
In former times, and even now, many country people 
think that these maggots are the cause of giddiness in 
sheep, and even epileptic fits, on which account the an- 
cients recommended the maggots of the sheep bot-fly as a 
remedy for epilepsy; and we read in Trallianus that the 
oracle of Delphi advised a certain Democrates of Athens, 
who was afflicted with epilepsy, to use these worms tied up 
in a linen bag and worn around his neck. 
This fact certainly argues that the Homeopathic Law 
taught by the celebrated Hahnemann, Similia similibus cu- 
ranter, was applied to the treatment of disease in very an- 
cient times, and those who will not acknowledge this law 
of therapeia must have very little acquaintance with the 
ancient history of medicine and its collateral sciences. 
Cicero, in his epistle to Atticus, says that the Greek phy- 
sician Craterus cured the elephantiasis of the East, caused 
by immoderate use of reptile food, by administering small 
quantities of the flesh of vipers; and Antonius Musa, the 
physician of the Emperor Octavius Augustus, cured invet- 
erate ulcers in the same manner. 
Some years ago, when we were traveling through Hayti, 
there lived a Frenchman named Morin in the mountains 
of Fond des Negres, near Port-au-Prince, who was so fond 
of liquor that he filled a bottle with whisky out of a hogs- 
head in which we preserved snakes, lizards, toads, and 
frogs, and of course drank it all, Three weeks afterward 
his face and whole body were swollen, and covered with a 
thick, leathery skin, constituting the disease called ele- 
phantiasis. When that unfortunate man applied to us for 
a remedy for that dreadful disease, we, remembering the 
prescription of Craterus and Antonius Musa, advised him 
to use the flesh of snakes, which benefited him very much, 
and relieved his sufferings; but whether or no our homeo- 
